Saturday, March 02, 2013

Ephemeral Blaznous OR The Most Erotic Thing

My tenure at Oh Get a Grip blog is coming to an end, so I thought I'd
reprint one my my contributions here. The question for the week was
"What is the most erotic thing?" You'd think that would be easy to
answer, but it wasn't for me.

Ephemeral Blaznous

Recent studies have determined that your brain
doesn’t distinguish between actually
doing something and reading about it. So my sex scene can make your
brain think you actually had a sexual experience? I don't think so. It
might get you in the mood. It might set off body responses tied to
arousal. But how much of that is the brain and how much is the body? Do
the mechanisms of arousal (such as increased blood flow to the genitals)
start a feedback loop of sexual expectation and more arousal? And is
there
causality between expectation and experience when you read? If you
expect to be scared by a
horror novel, is it more likely to scare you? Similarly if you expect to
be
turned on by erotica, are you more likely to get aroused?

I
think quite a bit about what’s erotic and I have no clue
how to begin to discuss it. Not one. Some things turn me on and I spend a
lot
of time analyzing why but I never figure it out. Part of that is because
there's a gap between what's happening in my brain and my ability to
describe it. It’s as if we don’t even have
the language to describe the erotic.When we try to talk about the erotic we often fall back on the symptoms (physical) because the causality (mental) is
outside shared experience or whatever it is that gives us the ability to slap a
word on an idea and pass it around like an appetizer tray at a party. Sex we
can talk about forever because it’s fairly simple. It can be examined as a
purely physical act. The erotic is far more mysterious.

There
are infinite colors outside the visible spectrum and I
guarantee you not one is named. Things can exist without having a word
attached, but that makes it awfully hard to discuss them. So for the
sake of argument, think of the concept of an unimaginable color and call
it Ephemeral Blaznous. Why Blaznous? Because it couldn’t be called
Ephemeral
Blue. There may be millions of shades of blue but blue is a specific
idea. Blue is something we can talk about and the letters B-L-U-E in
that arrangement can contain the concept of it in text and evoke the
image of it.The erotic isn't as easy as blue. As an idea, it's a
slippery sucker that dodges just as you try to pin a definition on it.
It changes over time. It hovers outside the spectrum. It's blaznous.

I could
tell you about things
that turn me on, but only a general description of what I saw or read
and I can't tell you why. The
actual trigger, if there’s only one and it isn’t a cumulative thing, is a
big old
mystery. This is why I'm a bit in awe of the "porn" writers who can
reach out and evoke a physical response to their words in just a few
paragraphs. There's a real art to that. But it doesn't quite fit my idea
of the erotic.

What's most erotic thing? I don’t know it. Often,
stories or movies
almost reach the state of pure eroticism for me, but then they devolve
[I'm a bit sorry I used this word, as there's nothing wrong with the physical, but I can't change it now] into the
physical because it’s easier that way or because the artist felt a need
to
resort to the shared vocabulary of sex or maybe they reach that state of
Ephemeral Blaznous where everything gets hazy and fragments into
uncertainty,
and while they can reach for it, they can never drag it into the visible
spectrum. Much like my thoughts on
this topic.